Lake Guntersville lighthouse, now for sale, 8-story monument to man's life work (62 Photos)

GUNTERSVILLE, Alabama - The lighthouse on Lake Guntersville attracts the curious. They drift by in their boats, their voices carrying over the water as they try to guess why the structure is there. Some don’t realize the lighthouse fronts what is an 18,000-square-foot home. What many don’t know is the eight-story structure is the culmination of one man’s life work.

The lighthouse house Jim Kennamer built on four acres of lake-front property is for sale now, on the market for $3.25 million. The property has been appraised for $6 million, but with a soft economy and the desire to sell, Realtor Ernie Tidmore has set a lower price.

The Kennamers, Jim and Loretta, had always planned to sell when Jim turned 80, but poor health has meant those plans have come two years early. Their four kids don’t want to live there if their parents aren’t there, Loretta Kennamer said.

“It’s time,” Kennamer said.

Kennamer grew up in the construction business, going to work for his father when he was just 12. By 16, he was running job sites, Kennamer said on a recent afternoon in the sunroom of the lighthouse house he built overlooking the lake. The house stands on land Kennamer bought at the insistence of a friend in 1963. He couldn’t afford the $11,500 asking price, Kennamer said, but the man insisted. He wanted Kennamer and his family to have the place, no argument.

For a $2,500 down payment and a handshake, the friend handed the deed over. Kennamer began building the first house in which he and Loretta Kennamer would raise their children, moving in on Christmas Eve 1963. Their house was always a hum of activity as their children’s friends came to go boating or to swim in the pool, Loretta Kennamer said. They dug crawfish out of the nearby creek and jumped off the boat house their dad had built.

“If we had a dollar for every mile he’s pulled someone skiing, we’d have plenty of money,” Loretta Kennamer said, joking.

A renovation and expansion came in 1972, but it was the lighthouse that has made the home the object of so much interest. Kennamer began it after he retired in 1999. A quadruple bypass operation meant it was time to slow down, but that wasn’t easy for a man who had worked hard all his life. In his career, Kennamer built high rises, motels, hotels and the original lodge and chalets at Guntersville State Park. He also designed and built the Gunters Landing golf course.

“The good Lord gave me many talents and the will to use them,” Kennamer said.

To try to do something for young families, Kennamer bought some software to design starter homes. He was playing around with that one day when he hit on the idea of a lighthouse, a design he had always liked.

“He said, ‘Mama, I’m going to build a lighthouse on the back of this house,” Loretta said, remembering the announcement. “I said, ‘Jim Kennamer, you have lost your mind.’”

But build a lighthouse he did, tearing down five bedrooms, seven bathrooms and a playroom to provide the space for the base of the lighthouse. For the next five years, he worked on the construction of the place, creating a graduated structure that is topped with a catwalk that affords a panoramic view of Lake Guntersville. A hydraulic lift elevates a roof that keeps water out of the spiral staircase leading up to the walk.

That’s just one of the special features in a house so large it’s easy to get turned around in. “Even I get lost,” Tidmore said as he showed two visitors around recently. Kennamer thought of everything, Tidmore said, from a panel in each room that allows you to turn the lights on and off in the entire house, to a thermal heating and cooling system that operates at a third of what it would typically cost to run.

The details go on and one, from a master suite with two huge bathrooms to deep crown molding in every room. Each door in the house is fitted with more than $500 worth of hardware.

While the house is 18,000-square-feet “under beam,” about 4,000-square-feet of that space is unfinished, Tidmore said. The kitchen was also never remodeled, plans for that derailed after Kennamer’s health began to fail. He also never got around to putting in the antique light he was going to buy for the top of the lighthouse.

Over the years, the lighthouse has attracted hundreds of people who have knocked on the door and asked if they could see it. Loretta Kennamer wishes she had kept a guest book of all the people who came to look, including the man from New York who came and spent the day.

Tidmore gets many requests to show the house, so many that he has to limit the trips out to the house to people who qualify to purchase it. He won’t hold an open house on the property, he said, because there’s no way to supervise one.

Leaving the property where they’ve lived for half a century isn’t easy for the Kennamers. Four family weddings have been held on the place, and the lawn on the lakeside of the property is the perfect place to have a party in the late afternoon, Jim Kennamer said.

Now that it’s time to go, though, the couple would like to see a family with children buy the place. It always, despite its dramatic exterior, has been just a family home.